Cumming, Georgia

Hi all, my name is Peihsun Yeh, but I just go by Ben. I moved around a lot, so there's no "one" place that I can really say I grew up in. I was born in Taiwan, and I moved into the States when I was 7 or so, and from then I have moved to Massachusetts, to Georgia....back to Massachusetts....back to Georgia, which is where I am now. I spent the longest time in the neighborhood I live now, which is a neighborhood called Creekside, in the city of Cumming in Forsyth County, and unfortunately I dont' remember much of where I lived before then.

Here is a mapquested image of my neighborhood (circled by black):

The starred spot is my house. Creekside and the surrounding area are a textbook definition of sprawl . There are shopping plazas neighborhorhoods and roads galore. There is no place outside my neighborhood accessible by foot. In fact, my neighborhood is situated at the intersection of two heavily used roads, and there is a Publix and other shops right across the road, yet not a crosswalk in sight. The two streets that cross are always busy, and even busier around rush hour which makes going in and out of the neighborhood a giant hassle.

As for the neighborhood itself, Suburban Nation mentions that neighborhoods seemingly go under no planning, as characterized by a multitude of curved roads and such - Creekside is guilty of that. Creekside is also plagued by planning with complete disregard to the sporadic elevation, which further discourages walking to even inside the neighborhood. The houses themselves were not like the "cookie cutter" houses that were described in Suburban Nation (houses that looked exactly like the one next to it) - they do exhibit a certain degree of architectural variety.

I would like to point out that I'm (or used to be) an avid runner, and in all my years of running in that neighborhood, I don't think I've seen more than 20% of the residents there. BThe people are friendly enough to smile and nod should you pass them by, but people mostly keep to themselves. Even at the neighborhood pool (which isn't more than a 10-15 minutes walk away from even the farthest corner of the neighborbood, yet people would prefer to drive there), a common gathering ground of children and adult alike, the people, detached, do not display any sense of community.

Creekside does seem to support the contention that is presented in Suburban Nation, which is that urban sprawl is "bad". Creekside is not an old neighborhood. My family and I must have moved there just a few years after it was built. The fact that I had to drive to get anywhere outside the neighborhood is more frustrating than anything else. It would be easily more livable if the area isn't so automobile dependant. And despite the sprawl, my friends and I often have a hard time finding interesting places to go within the city.